Lie Still

14

After pulling in to my driveway, I rolled down the windows, opened the sunroof, adjusted my seat into a more comfortable position, and picked out Harry Dunn’s file.

The top sheet detailed an efficient list of Harry’s trysts for the last year, courtesy of the Diskreet Agency, for whom my respect was growing. Fourteen different lovers, times and dates, most of them anonymous women met in roadside motels, only one person I knew.

Mary Ann had dallied with Harry for three weeks last October, once in the back of his Escalade. A telephoto lens had been able to showcase the crack of his ass. I wondered if Caroline had shared the details with Letty. Maybe she had blackmailed him into behaving and Letty was none the wiser. Caroline, the diabolical Dear Abby.

I glanced into Mary Ann’s and Jenny’s files. The first women, other than Letty, whom I met at the Bunko party that night. Official members of Caroline’s toxic little club. And right in my lap, their private applications for membership.

Caroline required that hopefuls answer invasive, truth-or-dare questions. They ranged from the softball, When did you tell your first lie? to What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made? to Who is the person you like least in Clairmont? A little beyond your average college sorority crap. These were very, very bored women.

The undertones rang clear to me. Hold back and you won’t get in. A bold line at the bottom promised that all applications were “strictly confidential.”

As for Jenny and Mary Ann, they wrote the answers to Caroline’s questions as if they’d sucked down a couple of pitchers of margaritas together and let their baggage and poor spelling fly.

Between them, they’d lain down for five abortions, seven plastic surgeries, and two arrests for public intoxication (literally, the cop had ordered them flat on the ground). They always voted a straight Republican ticket-except for Obama, because they both had always wanted to “do a black man.” The person they liked least in Clairmont was, not surprisingly, Letty Dunn, crossed out with the pen in a blink of sobriety (but not well enough to keep me from figuring it out) and replaced with “the pharmacist at Walmart because he won’t refill our Ambien without calling Dr. Gretch.”

I wondered whether the pharmacist they complained about was the one Tiffany mentioned was her husband. And whether that would aid or hinder her efforts to get in. I was beginning to understand the entanglements of small-town society. Take a step and your high heel was stuck in somebody’s net.

Jenny and Mary Ann shelled out their secrets for bonus points, leaving little need for Caroline to fill out the space she’d left for her own personal critique. What else was there to say? Caroline admitted both of them as members on the same day six years ago, maybe because Jenny’s husband ran a local branch of Bank of the West and Mary Ann’s owned half of Grandes Cielos, a popular upscale restaurant and shopping development at the east edge of Clairmont. I think that because those were the only facts highlighted, presumably by Caroline, in fluorescent yellow. I absently bit into the half an egg salad sandwich that Maria had wrapped up for me.

The only things that Caroline did personally note about the two women, scribbled and dated after a monthly meeting several years later, were that Mary Ann’s in heat all over town and Jenny’s breasts looked as hard as rocks tonight. I couldn’t see either of these women, who thrived on self-imposed drama, as interested enough in anything but themselves to be involved in Caroline’s disappearance. What was their motive? These two weren’t hiding a thing.

I’d avoided Letty’s file, intimidated by its thickness. A headache ebbed and flowed and the baby kicked, suggesting that I needed to get out of this cramped space. I tackled the cookie. Delicious.

Maybe one more file. Misty’s appeared to be a fast read. Thin. Probably a single page.

A tiny moth of paper fluttered out, onto the floor of the passenger seat. I bent down to pick it up. I felt like a rope was being pulled tight against my stomach.

Caroline’s pretty handwriting was upside down. I righted it.

A stranger is someone you know.

I turned the piece of paper over. A single word, scribbled in pencil.

A question really.

Alice???

An hour later, I swung open the door of Copy Boy.

I didn’t want anyone in Clairmont to see what I was doing, so my iPhone led me here, to a low-end, family-owned Kinkos competitor in a town fifteen miles away. Seven former customers had posted online that the service sucked.

For ten minutes, the high school kid behind the counter lazily watched me struggle to figure out an off-brand Japanese copier the size of a small Toyota. The machine was loaded with enough buttons to fire a cruise missile. Actually, there were probably fewer buttons involved in firing a cruise missile.

“I just want to make a fucking copy! Where the fuck’s the button that says ‘make a fucking copy’?” I didn’t normally cuss at high school boys-I’m a good Catholic girl who normally doesn’t cuss out loud at all-but the hormones were coursing and I was furiously tugging on a Yankees sweatshirt even though it was 102 outside. Retail air-conditioning in Texas summer is like a brisk fall day in Manhattan.

Copy Boy sighed heavily. New Yorkers aimed the F word like a Smith & Wesson into city streets and cafés, at perfect strangers, over the mildest of infractions, and the rubber bullets bounced right off. Here in Clairmont, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the word in polite company, only on HBO.

He strolled over, hit the “reset” button several times, thrust his hand out for the first stack of papers without looking at me or them, slapped them into the correct slot, punched four more buttons, and we watched them happily collate.

In the kind of voice reserved for small children, Copy Boy explained how to repeat those steps for the next batch of papers. He stood a foot from me at all times, like he feared I might bite. Actually, I might. After a paper jam and brief battle with the credit card scanner, I was good to go.

The edges of the other files stuck out of my purse. Tempting. Was it more illegal to copy other people’s files? I glanced over at Copy Boy, all plugged up with his iPod, head down, and thumbs moving like the legs of a speeding roach across his phone. He would be a terrible witness in court.

I reached over to my purse, opened another file, slid the papers in place, and pressed “collate.”

“I didn’t do it.”

I laid the police reports that Mike tossed in my face the night before neatly onto the shining glass surface of his desk.

I had driven directly to his office from the copying store. I gave him no warning. Angie, the temp secretary that Mike said was living a second life as a dancer in a cage at Cowboys Stadium, cheerfully waved me into his office “as a surprise.” She scored the best flat-abs-to-big-boobs ratio I’d ever seen. Mike had conveniently left that part out.

Mike glared at me, then took a tense stroll over to shut the door. I glanced around the room, the first office he’d ever occupied that didn’t roll on wheels and come fully loaded with a trunk of armor.

The interior designer had opted for saccharine. Creamy walls. Wedding-cake crown molding tacked into every nook and cranny possible. Forgettable modern paintings with bright slashes of color. Two floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a bare, plant-free courtyard open to the blazing sun. I wandered over to look out. A dead vine drizzled over a gazebo. Four iron benches at the corners, probably heated to 150 degrees, waited to grill somebody’s rear end. Designed, I guessed, by a non-Texan.

“I can’t hear the screams of the prisoners,” I said. The architect of this three-year-old building had stuck the booking area and soundproof holding cells in the basement. Mike found this an oddly primitive concept. He’d joked about people disappearing off the Clairmont streets, never to be seen again.

He pressed an intercom button on his phone and spoke roughly. “Hold my calls, please.”

“Just like in the movies.” I was trying for a way in.

I dropped into a hard upright, green-striped upholstered chair in the corner and couldn’t help but think how good he looked in blue.

“Can I be Katharine Hepburn?”

“You think this is funny?”

Just like that, he turned me on, and not in a good way.

“No, Mike.” My words were taut with anger. “I do not think this is funny. I think it is shocking that you think that I could kill a man and then hide it from you for our whole marriage.”

Mike’s eyes bored into me, disbelieving.

“How can you possibly put this on me?”

The words were in there, ready to go. About how I tried to confess everything to Mike the night before our wedding and give him the chance to opt out. How he had deserved to know what he was getting into. How I stopped myself from telling him on a blanket in Central Park and after I met his mother and on the night we wrote our wedding vows.

“I don’t think you killed a man, Emily. Christ, you can’t even watch CSI reruns without changing the channel. What I think is that you will never, ever tell me the complete truth about yourself. I think we’re done with the surprises and then Whoops, look out, here comes another kick to the nuts.”

“I did it for you,” I insisted stubbornly. “I didn’t think it would look good for your career if you married someone who was once a suspect, however briefly, in a murder. I knew you’d feel obligated to share it with your superiors. This way, no one had to know.” Not the whole truth, but part of it.

Mike cracked his knuckles in annoyance, something I’d never seen him do. “First of all, my guess is my superiors know. They just didn’t find it significant enough to talk about. You weren’t an official suspect, right? Did the police even interview you? If so, there’s no record of it. It’s only significant to me because you chose to hide it. Am I getting through to you at all?”

He whipped around and faced the vertical painting behind his desk, a swath of gloppy red, with a saffron dot of color drifting off the canvas in the left corner. I could have painted it in sixty seconds with my eyes closed. I wasn’t sure what the artist intended as the message. But I felt like the yellow dot.

“If it weren’t for the baby…”

He said it under his breath, with his back to me. But I heard.

“What?” My voice rose, surely carrying through the thin, cheap walls that were a given in showy, taxpayer-funded buildings like this one, unless you were locked up in the basement.

“What’s the if? You wouldn’t stay with me? Say it, Mike. Say you want to leave me.”

“You’re ridiculous, you know that? I’ve had almost twenty-four hours to think about this. And you want to know my grand conclusion? If it weren’t for the baby, I’d be stupid enough to sleep on the couch in the reception room for another night. Maybe two nights. But it appears there is nothing you can do… nothing, do you hear me?… that will ever make me walk out on you. I figured that out three therapists ago. And right now, with all this weirdness…” He gestured to the air. “I’m not leaving you alone at night.”

The tears fell in a dismal trail down my face. Still, he refused to look at me. I couldn’t blame him.

“I’m so sorry, Mike.” My voice wobbled. “I’m so sorry.” I didn’t stop repeating it, couldn’t, until he walked over and pulled me tightly to him. We stood that way for a long time.

“You look more like Ingrid Bergman than Hepburn,” he said, finally, nuzzling my neck. “Let’s go home.”

“I love you, Mike.” I whispered it, half wishing he’d push harder right now, for real, interrogating me like one of his suspects-but then, Mike never did turn that side of himself on me.

He smiled gently, still expecting the best of me, and rubbed my stomach.

“Let me guess your next surprise. It’s twins?”

“No,” I said, slowly. “It’s a boy. Just one boy.”

“What’s that?” He gestured to the Ziploc bag that I’d rested on the desk.

“I’ll tell you at home.” I scooped it up.

In the car, I pressed my head back against the seat and screwed my eyes shut, physically whipped. Surely I wasn’t doing the baby any good. I needed all of this to stop.

Mike stared straight ahead at the road as he flicked the wipers on to take care of a fine mist settling on the windshield. And then he asked, as casually as he’d ask if I wanted to order a pizza for supper. I knew the question was coming eventually, and it might as well be now, in the twilight of this strange day.

“Do you know who shot Pierce Martin?”

“No,” I said, automatically. “But if it counts, I wished him dead every day.”

There was one thing left. The thing that had been sleeping and waking inside me every day since I was nineteen.

The mist crept over the car, shutting out the world.

“I have a daughter from the rape,” I said, and Mike nearly ran off the road.

I was nineteen years old and three months pregnant when I first met Lia.

She was sitting with her small pile of possessions, cross-legged on the cobblestones of an Italian courtyard, counting out fifty-nine stones. When I bent down to hand her a euro, she grabbed my hand and begged me to pray the rosary with her.

Lia was blind. Most days, she hung out a few footsteps away from Mary’s Refuge in Ravello, which rests on a promontory above the Mediterranean Sea. Lia taught me that pretty beads are unnecessary. The counting is the important part.

I found the flyer for Mary’s Refuge on a bulletin board in the vestibule of my college’s Catholic chapel, a tiny stone building on the edge of campus with one small stained-glass window. It was the day after I learned that I was pregnant from the rape.

A student Catholic organization was trying to drum up money for Sister Abby Francis and her small endeavor by the sea for unwed mothers. I tore the piece of paper off the wall. I would go there. For a while, I would become someone else.

When my baby was born on a chilly September day in a 900-year-old villa in a city hanging off a cliff, an ocean away from its conception, I didn’t want to even see the face, to think of it as human.

She is perfect, one of the sisters assured me gently. She counted and blessed all of my daughter’s fingers and toes like a living rosary. I glimpsed a tiny pink face.

We will find her a good home.

The little girl who haunts my dreams stands at the top of a hill, waiting. She gets a little older each year. In a month, she turns thirteen.